It is Sunday morning, and so cold and still outside that you can't hear anything but some birds and the sound of ice crunching up against the bridge. Perfect day to curl up with some hot chocolate and read what's been going on in the education world.
Charter Schools Are Not the Answer in Ohio
The superintendent of the education center in Lorain County, Ohio (the area where I had my first teaching gig) explains why charters just aren't the answer in Ohio.
Looking Anew at How Teachers Teach
"Anew" might be the wrong word here-- Larry Cuban puts the current kerflufflation over teaching in the context of the history of teaching kerfluffles.
Why Do Teachers Need Instructional Coaches
I have mixed feelings about "instructional coaches," but Peter DeWitt makes a good case for them here.
Stop Humiliating Teachers
David Denby at the New Yorker speaks out against the tradition of hammering on teachers everytime the country hits a rough patch.
An Open Letter To John Lewis
I love this letter-- not because it stands up for Bernie Sanders against the civil rights giants' comments earlier this week, and not because it manages to do so without using any of the asshat attacks on Lewis that characterized a lot of the Sanders "support" this week-- but because it includes a great story and reminder of how social movements really make a difference.
Trust Teachers
Russ Walsh makes a solid argument against the age-old practice of putting our trust in programs instead of teachers.
Showing posts with label Peter DeWitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter DeWitt. Show all posts
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Risk and Rules
In his excellent look at the value of teacher coaches, Peter DeWitt drops this line with an important embedded assumption:
In order for coaching to work properly, the school has to have a climate conducive to learning, which means that there needs to be a balance between risk-taking and rule following.
A climate conducive to learning has to have a balance between risk-taking and rule-following. That notion really resonates with me, because I see teaching as an ongoing balancing act. And some of that balance is between risk and rules.
I spend a lot of time railing against rules and restrictions and oppressive demands for one-size-fits-all conformity, but my first published education rant was a letter to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) journal complaining about the loose foolishness of whole language approaches. I'm a lot less tightly wound than when I was younger, but I really don't have much trouble understanding the point of view of conservative commenters on education.
Larry Cuban captures the age-old tension in a recent post.
Two traditions of teaching have competed with one another for millennia. Each has had a grab-bag of names over the centuries: conservative vs. liberal, hard vs. soft pedagogy, subject-centered vs. child-centered, traditional vs. progressive, teacher-centered vs. student-centered, mimetic vs. transformational.
Each tradition has its own goals (transmit knowledge to next generation vs. helping children grow into full human beings); practices (teacher-centered vs. student-centered); and desired outcomes (knowledgeable and skilled adults ready to enter the labor market and society versus an outcome of moral and civic engaged adults who use their knowledge and skills to help themselves and their communities). No evidence, then or now, has confirmed advocates’ claims for either tradition. These are choices anchored in beliefs.
Cuban goes on to suggest that the best teachers use a blend of both, but while I don't disagree with that notion, I don't see an equivalency between the two schools. The mimetic tradition is a very useful tool in achieving transformational teaching, but ultimately they are no more equivalent than a hammer and a house built with it.
The mimetic tradition is all about rules, about content set in concrete. By itself it is lifeless and inert. This is the sort of thing that Emerson railed against in "Self-Reliance"-- The ultimate traditionalist mimetic subject is Latin, a language dead and fossilized. I occasionally talk to someone who studied it and found the experience wonderful-- and invariably they are people who took the dead, dry stuff and made it transformational through their own use of it.
And yet there can be no transformation of a student into someone more fully human and completely themselves based simply on air, any more than you can build a blazing fire without anything to burn.Without the glass, the glass is neither half empty or half full-- it's just a puddle. Luke shuts down his targeting computer, but not his X-wing fighter. When I'm playing a jazz solo, I can play whatever I feel or want, but it lives or dies against the background of the chord structure.
Rules are the foundation on which everything else stands, but they are not the be-all and the end-all. They are not the purpose.Most importantly, our students are not there to serve the rules-- the rules are there to serve them.
Balancing rules and risk remains a challenge. The reformster program is all about rules-- rules piled on rules governed by rules enforced by more rules, based on a belief that we can just rulify education into a state of perfection. But perfection, like balance, is not a state-- it's a process.
Education is a balancing act performed by a teacher on a unicycle juggling twenty bowling balls with her hands while holding a long balance pole across her knees while a pack of squirrels chase each other back and forth across the pole while a flock of geese keeps flying through them all. Reformsters and other rules fans think the way to fix this system is to weld the parts of the unicycle together, put the teacher in straightjacket, and crazy-glue the pole to her knees. And if it doesn't seem to work, they think they just haven't done the welding and gluing in the right position-- but their premise is wrong.
The dynamic tension between rules and risk cannot be "settled," and more than we can devise a one-size-fits-all formula for transforming children into more fully realized grown humans. It's an ongoing process, and endless act of balance best managed by the person there on the high wire and not the clowns down on the ground.
In order for coaching to work properly, the school has to have a climate conducive to learning, which means that there needs to be a balance between risk-taking and rule following.
A climate conducive to learning has to have a balance between risk-taking and rule-following. That notion really resonates with me, because I see teaching as an ongoing balancing act. And some of that balance is between risk and rules.
I spend a lot of time railing against rules and restrictions and oppressive demands for one-size-fits-all conformity, but my first published education rant was a letter to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) journal complaining about the loose foolishness of whole language approaches. I'm a lot less tightly wound than when I was younger, but I really don't have much trouble understanding the point of view of conservative commenters on education.
Larry Cuban captures the age-old tension in a recent post.
Two traditions of teaching have competed with one another for millennia. Each has had a grab-bag of names over the centuries: conservative vs. liberal, hard vs. soft pedagogy, subject-centered vs. child-centered, traditional vs. progressive, teacher-centered vs. student-centered, mimetic vs. transformational.
Each tradition has its own goals (transmit knowledge to next generation vs. helping children grow into full human beings); practices (teacher-centered vs. student-centered); and desired outcomes (knowledgeable and skilled adults ready to enter the labor market and society versus an outcome of moral and civic engaged adults who use their knowledge and skills to help themselves and their communities). No evidence, then or now, has confirmed advocates’ claims for either tradition. These are choices anchored in beliefs.
Cuban goes on to suggest that the best teachers use a blend of both, but while I don't disagree with that notion, I don't see an equivalency between the two schools. The mimetic tradition is a very useful tool in achieving transformational teaching, but ultimately they are no more equivalent than a hammer and a house built with it.
The mimetic tradition is all about rules, about content set in concrete. By itself it is lifeless and inert. This is the sort of thing that Emerson railed against in "Self-Reliance"-- The ultimate traditionalist mimetic subject is Latin, a language dead and fossilized. I occasionally talk to someone who studied it and found the experience wonderful-- and invariably they are people who took the dead, dry stuff and made it transformational through their own use of it.
And yet there can be no transformation of a student into someone more fully human and completely themselves based simply on air, any more than you can build a blazing fire without anything to burn.Without the glass, the glass is neither half empty or half full-- it's just a puddle. Luke shuts down his targeting computer, but not his X-wing fighter. When I'm playing a jazz solo, I can play whatever I feel or want, but it lives or dies against the background of the chord structure.
Rules are the foundation on which everything else stands, but they are not the be-all and the end-all. They are not the purpose.Most importantly, our students are not there to serve the rules-- the rules are there to serve them.
Balancing rules and risk remains a challenge. The reformster program is all about rules-- rules piled on rules governed by rules enforced by more rules, based on a belief that we can just rulify education into a state of perfection. But perfection, like balance, is not a state-- it's a process.
Education is a balancing act performed by a teacher on a unicycle juggling twenty bowling balls with her hands while holding a long balance pole across her knees while a pack of squirrels chase each other back and forth across the pole while a flock of geese keeps flying through them all. Reformsters and other rules fans think the way to fix this system is to weld the parts of the unicycle together, put the teacher in straightjacket, and crazy-glue the pole to her knees. And if it doesn't seem to work, they think they just haven't done the welding and gluing in the right position-- but their premise is wrong.
The dynamic tension between rules and risk cannot be "settled," and more than we can devise a one-size-fits-all formula for transforming children into more fully realized grown humans. It's an ongoing process, and endless act of balance best managed by the person there on the high wire and not the clowns down on the ground.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Honesty, Sass, and Public Ed
I have had this piece from Peter DeWitt open in a tab for days, trying to formulate a response. DeWitt, as he sometimes does, is pondering the problem of trying to be a calm centrist in the ongoing debate about American public education.
He believes there are people of good intent on both sides, but worries that they are being drowned out by strident, sarcastic voices that are dominating-- loudly-- the conversation. "Do we really have a problem without a solution?" he asks in the headline.
It's not the first time he's raised the issue, and it always resonates with me because I am someone who also generally likes a reasonable centrist approach to problems. I'm generally a peacemaker, not a fighter. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that I am one of the voices of sass and sarcasm in this conversation. And given my readership, I have to believe that my sass and sarcasm resonates with a fair number of people.
So how does that happen? How do a desire for solutions and taste for bridgemaking end up hand-in-hand with sass and spleenic venting?
Background Reading
Okay-- stay with me for a second. A few days back Andy Smarick wrote this piece asking, as Jennifer Berkshire put it on twitter, for people to use their inside voices when discussing charters:
I have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective.
I responded by suggesting that things looked a little more messy at the local level than up at the stratospheric philosophical level. And that charters could improve the conversation by behaving better:
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
Yesterday, Jersey Jazzman advanced the conversation a step by bringing up the item that addresses both Smarick and DeWitt's concerns.
Honesty.
A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools-- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today-- is anything but honest.
How important is honesty?
Critical conversations, in fact any kind of relationship, require one fundamental item-- both parties have to show up. Showing up requires honesty-- telling the truth as you see it. Not salesmanship, not spin, not trolling, not even "being nice" to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Anything other than honesty is corrosive to a conversation, a relationship. (And you can trust me on this-- I have the divorce papers from my first marriage to prove it.)
We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of "is" is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that's a lie. For me, that also explains what's wrong with lying-- it's an attempt to take away another person's ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It's wrong because it's about stealing another person's freedom to choose.
How do we react to being lied to?
Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:
* I don't care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you're stupid
* We both know I'm lying, but you're powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don't matter; I'm in charge here
* This is not a real conversation
Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.
But here's the most important thing I know about lying.
Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.
So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it's a way of saying, "Look. I want you to know that I don't believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else."
In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest-- they just don't know what they're talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven't had an honest word to say about education in years.
They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I'm not so sure, but she's met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I've got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck.
How DeWitt can feel better
Anyway. If I were talking to Peter DeWitt that the sarcasm and snark are actually part of trying to get to a real conversation, not an obstacle to it. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," is snarky, but it's also an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the truth.
Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There's no way to respond to something like "We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession" that doesn't sound like snark. There's no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there's no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn't leave him feeling naked.
To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can't be afraid to go there. We can't make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can't be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.
He believes there are people of good intent on both sides, but worries that they are being drowned out by strident, sarcastic voices that are dominating-- loudly-- the conversation. "Do we really have a problem without a solution?" he asks in the headline.
It's not the first time he's raised the issue, and it always resonates with me because I am someone who also generally likes a reasonable centrist approach to problems. I'm generally a peacemaker, not a fighter. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that I am one of the voices of sass and sarcasm in this conversation. And given my readership, I have to believe that my sass and sarcasm resonates with a fair number of people.
So how does that happen? How do a desire for solutions and taste for bridgemaking end up hand-in-hand with sass and spleenic venting?
Background Reading
Okay-- stay with me for a second. A few days back Andy Smarick wrote this piece asking, as Jennifer Berkshire put it on twitter, for people to use their inside voices when discussing charters:
I have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective.
I responded by suggesting that things looked a little more messy at the local level than up at the stratospheric philosophical level. And that charters could improve the conversation by behaving better:
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
Yesterday, Jersey Jazzman advanced the conversation a step by bringing up the item that addresses both Smarick and DeWitt's concerns.
Honesty.
A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools-- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today-- is anything but honest.
How important is honesty?
Critical conversations, in fact any kind of relationship, require one fundamental item-- both parties have to show up. Showing up requires honesty-- telling the truth as you see it. Not salesmanship, not spin, not trolling, not even "being nice" to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Anything other than honesty is corrosive to a conversation, a relationship. (And you can trust me on this-- I have the divorce papers from my first marriage to prove it.)
We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of "is" is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that's a lie. For me, that also explains what's wrong with lying-- it's an attempt to take away another person's ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It's wrong because it's about stealing another person's freedom to choose.
How do we react to being lied to?
Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:
* I don't care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you're stupid
* We both know I'm lying, but you're powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don't matter; I'm in charge here
* This is not a real conversation
Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.
But here's the most important thing I know about lying.
Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.
So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it's a way of saying, "Look. I want you to know that I don't believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else."
In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest-- they just don't know what they're talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven't had an honest word to say about education in years.
They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I'm not so sure, but she's met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I've got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck.
How DeWitt can feel better
Anyway. If I were talking to Peter DeWitt that the sarcasm and snark are actually part of trying to get to a real conversation, not an obstacle to it. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," is snarky, but it's also an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the truth.
Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There's no way to respond to something like "We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession" that doesn't sound like snark. There's no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there's no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn't leave him feeling naked.
To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can't be afraid to go there. We can't make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can't be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.
A civil conversation requires honesty.
And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed,
about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and
vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on
the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf
A civil conversation requires honesty.
And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed,
about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and
vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on
the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf
have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is
that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective,
sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf
have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is
that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective,
sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf
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